Is Resistive Coupling Feasible for the Reception of Power-Line Communications Data?

Historically, two classes of coupling circuits have been used for power-line communications (PLC), being capacitive couplers and inductive couplers. In this paper, resistive coupling as a radical and novel approach is investigated specifically for the reception of PLC data. The main goal of this new approach, is to reduce costs associated with traditional capacitive and inductive couplers, seeing that resistors are the cheapest electronic components available. Only two resistors are required to implement a voltage-divider setup which reduces the harmful ac power waveform to a safe level, after which (cheaper) low-spec components can be used to filter and process the scaleddown, sampled waveform. Simulation results as well as off-line and live experimental results are shown to confirm that the superimposed PLC signal can be extracted successfully with resistive PLC coupling.